by ISHMAEL REED
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and Somaly Mam in 2012 in New York City. PHOTO/Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for Conde Nast Traveler/Slate
(Nicholas Kristof is in his study. He is at work on his New York Times’ column. Calls in his black maid, Betsy. She’s about fifty-five. Slender. Wears church hats on Sunday. Has a son and daughter in college. She and her husband, a parking lot attendant, saved money to send them there. Favorite dessert is sweet potato pie. Her favorite song is “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” sung by Aretha Franklin.)
Kristof: Betsy, would you come in here a minute?
Betsy: (She’s waxing the kitchen floor. Rises. Exasperated.)
What he want now? I bet I know. (Enters his study.) Yes, Mr. Kristof.
Kristof: As you know, Betsy, I have been traveling around the world in my quest to save humanity. Giving my advice to the poor on how they can take responsibility for their actions. As when I told the men in the Congo that they can improve the lives of their wives and children by refraining from whoring, drinking and smoking. For my advice I often get called sanctimonious, haughty and callous.
Betsy: They wrong. You a good man, Mr. Kristof.
…
Kristof: Do you think that race relations have improved in forty years?
Betsy: (My sister’s son is in prison for possessing one stick of marijuana. My brother’s home was foreclosed. My neighborhood has been taken over by these young white people. They don’t clean up their dogs’ poop. If I tell him what he want to hear, maybe I can get back to work). I think things have definitely improved. Why twenty years ago us maids had to run and catch the sundown bus back home or get arrested. It looked like the Olympics. I’d be all out of breath. Now I can drive my car up here.
Counterpunch for more
The White Knight
by AMANDA HESS
Kristof feels lousy when he has to “cut somebody off and say, ‘It’s terrible that you were shot in the leg,’ ” he said. “Meanwhile, I will go off and find someone who was shot in both legs.” But he does it because he knows that if he finds a compelling story abroad, Americans back home will line up to help. “I want to make people spill their coffee when they read the column,” he said. “I do want them to go and donate, volunteer, whatever it may be, to help chip away at some of these problems.”
Perhaps that is how he came to write about Long Pross, a Cambodian teenager who said she was kidnapped, beaten, tortured with electric currents, tied up, and sold in a brothel at 13, “where her brothel owner gouged out her right eye.” When the wound sprayed “blood and pus” on customers, Kristof wrote in a 2009 column, the owner “discarded” her. That story came courtesy of Somaly Mam, a telegenic Cambodian anti-trafficking activist who had rescued Pross after overcoming a similarly sad backstory. Mam said she had escaped rape and torture as a child sex-trafficking victim to advocate for girls like her, only to see her 14-year-old daughter kidnapped and gang-raped by human traffickers in retaliation. Kristof devoted columns to her, too, boosting her story and live-tweeting his ride-along on her 2011 brothel raid.
Last month, Newsweek revealed that the most horrific sections of Mam’s backstory had been inflated and fabricated, and that she had enlisted Pross—who had actually lost the eye after undergoing surgery for a nonmalignant tumor—to do the same. Responding to revelations about Mam’s deception, Kristof said in a column last week, “I wish I had never written about her.”
Slate for more